power

A sizable number of voters are following new Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s showdown with unionized public employees in his state, and nearly half side with the governor.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters agree more with the Republican governor in his dispute with union workers. Thirty-eight percent (38%) agree more with the unionized public employees, while 14% are undecided.

Additionally:

Thirty-eight percent (38%) of voters think teachers, firemen and policemen should be allowed to go on strike, but 49% disagree and believe they should not have that right. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure.

And finally:

Public employee unions have long been strong supporters, financially and otherwise, of Democratic Party candidates, so it’s no surprise that 68% of Democrats support the union workers in the Wisconsin dispute. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Republicans and 56% of voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties side with the governor. [emphasis mine]

The bold line is key. I find nothing particularly surprising about either of the percentages from Democrats polled or Republicans. But again this indicates that the Democrats have lost the independent vote and lost it significantly. Public opinion, based on this poll, is definitely with the Governor.

What is playing out in Wisconsin has been recognized by unions as a hill they must die on or suffer the probably irreversible consequences of losing political power. They also understand the potential reaches far outside Wisconsin. If Wisconsin goes, others could follow:

“Some of the labor people are saying, ‘It’s the beginning of the fight back,’” said a top labor official. “But if the labor movement rallies and gets run over in Wisconsin, it opens [the gates] in every state” for governors to start pushing harder to curtail labor rights.

“Not every state’s going to roll back collective bargaining,” the official — who, like many, spoke off the record to avoid undermining the protests — added, but said it could open the gates for union losses on various fronts, like benefits.

Don’t be fooled – this isn’t just about “benefits”. It is about power, politics and money. The mix of those three have given public sector unions a synergy that has allowed them, in many places, to hand pick Democratic representatives, have them elected and then have them do the union’s business. It is a pernicious and non-competitive arrangement that is finally, because of the financial downturn, coming to light.

But the unions have a problem. They haven’t been able to sell the emotional argument (benefits) and they certainly aren’t about to try to explain the real reason they’re fighting this (power and money). So what they’re having to deal with the the public’s perception, formed over many years in Wisconsin, that the public sector costs too much, has to be cut and that includes public sector employee benefits as well:

But this fight isn’t at the time or place of the unions’ choosing. Hostility to public-sector workers, including teachers, is at an all-time high amid a recession and a new national mania for curbing the tide of fiscal red ink. Walker appears to have a firm legislative majority on his side.

And labor is struggling to explain — and convince a voting public that has inched away from the concept of unions as a bedrock American institution over the years — that while it’s willing to be flexible on Walker’s demands for cost control, his attempts to change the rules governing public unions are a matter of institutional life and death and union principle. Labor hopes the public will see Walker’s attempt to use a budget gap to reshape labor-management relations as an overreach. But for many people watching from afar, the details of what Walker wants to accomplish have gotten lost, and the fight is playing out as yet another in a long string of recent state-based brawls over the high cost of the public sector.

So public sector unions have a heck of a PR problem not only in Wisconsin, but if the Rasmussen poll is to be believed, throughout the US. Nationally that could mean this:

Bradley Tusk, a former Illinois deputy governor and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign manager, said that if Walker succeeds in the fight, “this will be portrayed as a major change toward fiscal sanity and protecting taxpayers.”

“The average voter will never feel any pain from it,” he added, “so the high ground shifts away from labor. That puts Obama and other Democrats in the position of being forced further to the left, or moving more toward the GOP position and risking losing support from labor. … This almost creates some of the problems that a primary forces on the challenger.”

And the union’s “winning strategy” to counter that?

As a broader issue, in other states, national union officials think they’ve found a winning strategy in shifting the fight off government and slamming Wall Street, armed with repeated polls that show anti-financial industry sentiment at an all-time high.

Apparently, however, union officials don’t understand that it isn’t an “either/or” situation. The public blames both for different reasons. But more importantly, the public realizes “what is, is” and you deal with it. Whether they believe (or not) that Wall Street is to blame, that doesn’t change the fact that the problem (budget deficit) has to be confronted and solved and part of the solution has to be borne by public sector employees.

Norman Adler, a longtime lobbyist for public sector labor unions in New York, says the unions have to fight – that this is not something they can walk away from. And, if they lose in Wisconsin, they “have to reconfigure their tactics and move on.” But, he says:

“Labor pretty much lost the PR fight a number of years ago,” he said, suggesting the true targets of opportunity at the moment are state lawmakers who are “on the fence,” and can be swayed because they’re worried about getting elected back home. “And I think their position is that they have to show political muscle here.”

The Arkansas Democratic Senate primary race pitting incumbent and Obama choice Blanche Lincoln vs. labor’s candidate, the sitting Lt. Governor Bill Halter did a lot more than point out a riff between labor and the White House. It demonstrated how powerful labor is and what sorts of money it can throw into the political arena to try to influence the outcome of specific elections.

But there is more to the story than that. Conn Carroll at the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell points out that for the first time in the history of the United States, there are more government union workers than there are private union workers. 52% of all union members now on the rolls of a union are “public servants” in some capacity or another.

And, as Governor Chris Christie of NJ has experienced, they’re a force to be reckoned with when trying to reform government.

The irony, of course, is that the institution that helped force changes within the private sector to the point that union membership is declining precipitously, is now the number one union shop in America. In the private sector regulation, cultural changes and competition driven compensation and benefit packages all but rendered unions moot. But within the government that helped force this change, unions flourish. And they don’t seem shy in wielding their power to further feather their own nest.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels called government unions “the new privileged class in America.” Per Daniels government workers are now, on average, better paid than their private sector counterparts. And, of course, the sole purpose of unions is to protect jobs and secure better compensation and benefits.

That puts government unions at cross-purposes with any attempts to rein in the cost and scope of government at every level:

In Maine, the Maine Municipal Association, the SEIU, the Teamsters, and the Maine Education Association collectively spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to campaign against a ballot initiative that would have prevented government spending from growing faster than the combined rate of inflation and population growth. In Illinois, AFSCME Council 31 ran television and radio ads pushing for tax increases in their “Fair Budget Illinois” campaign. In Oregon, government unions provided 90 percent of the $4 million spent advocating two ballot initiatives to raise personal income and business taxes by $733 million.

Given the size and power of government unions, and the fact that that member dues are essentially paid by the taxpayer via member salaries, the argument could be made that taxpayers are subsidizing union activities which run counter to the tax payer’s best interest.

Don’t be fooled by the little spat in Arkansas between the White House and the unions. They’re joined at the hip and both know that the relationship they share is critical to the unions maintaining their grip on power, and the Democrats doing the same.